Chapter Text
The air in LOCCENT was buzzing, electric from the collective excitement of people, and it was intoxicating.
Everywhere Hermann looked people were toasting, laughing and celebrating their victory.
"We did it! We did it!" Came like a roar from the incorporeal mass. The crowd closed around him, but instead of feeling suffocated, Hermann felt warm. Relieved. As light as air.
The weight of someone hugging him pressed heavy around his shoulders and in front of his chest. He couldn't see who it was, but it was the most distinguishable sensation of them all. It made him feel solid, and in the clamor, he found himself leaning closer.
Maybe without this touch Hermann would disappear into the chant, like a drop of water in the ocean. He felt a pang of panic at the thought, and held on tighter, grabbing smooth fabric. His cheek rubbed over something scratchy. The skin that touched him was as hot as a furnace and Hermann brushed his nose and then his forehead to the scruffy spot, as the arms circling him shook desperately, holding him so tight Hermann thought their bodies might merge.
"Hermann," the weight said, taking shape. He recognized the voice immediately, as familiar as only that voice could be, creased with sadness and breaking at the edge. "It's over."
Hermann gasped awake and opened his eyes.
He blinked a few times, but the world around him didn't come into focus.
His head was throbbing, his stomach felt unsettled, and there was a foul taste in his mouth. The dull pain in his head was making it hard to keep his eyes open for long. He closed them and his thoughts swayed in the dark.
The background hum of machinery played a soothing rhythm. So familiar and calming. He turned on his side to go back to sleep.
A sharp, familiar pain shot through his left hip.
Hermann growled, cursing under his breath, and buried his face into the pillow.
With pain came wakefulness, and as he recovered he noticed how stiff his body felt, how uncomfortable and lumpy his bed was.
He wasn't in his room.
The standard military cot in his quarters was as rigid as a wooden board (which was a different kind of intolerable), but with his hip sinking into the mattress and hurting at the slightest movement he couldn't help but miss it.
He stayed very still, panting for air, until the ache slowly faded. He opened his eyes again only to find himself facing the rattled backrest of a couch. He frowned and turned his neck to examine the room, without upsetting his leg.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw he was in his lab.
I must have fallen asleep here, was the only explanation his brain provided.
That was unusual. In all the years he'd worked in this lab, he'd never once spent the night on the dirty sofa. That didn't mean he'd never pulled an all-nighter. He'd done that many times. In fact, he may have done that more than what was physically acceptable for any human being. But he'd never been unconsidered enough to sleep in the lab.
Newton Geiszler was the one who passed out on the old couch at indecent hours — not Hermann.
But even so, this level of disorientation was concerning. He should command his body to stay awake long enough to move to his quarter and his proper (if not much more comfortable) bed.
His eyelashes were falling shut before he could even complete the thought. He was so tired. He didn't know what time it was, but the lab was still dark, except for a weak, yellow glow illuminating the ceiling. It was peaceful and quiet, and he supposed it wouldn't hurt anyone if he just—
A snore pierced the heavy silence.
Hermann's eyes snapped open again and he sat upright, his hipbone protesting painfully.
On the floor, right at the feet of the couch, Newton was sleeping.
Hermann was thrown aback by the sight. The biologist was lying face down, with an old blanket wrapped around him, one arm stretched over his head and the other holding what looked to be his leather jacket as an improvised pillow. He snored again, and the mathematician blinked in disbelief.
It was unprofessional enough for one of them to be sleeping on the broken couch in the far corner of Newton's unsafe and unsanitized side of the lab, but he would not allow his partner's laziness and negligence to reflect on both of them like this. He was about to startle Newton awake to tell him just how inconsiderate he was being, when he noticed a cut on his forehead. The dried blood looked almost like smeared paint. Hermann felt shivers run down his spine as he took in more details.
The torn leather jacket. The dirt in Newton's hair. His thick-framed glasses, resting on the floor close to his head, with one lens cracked.
The events of the day before rushed to Hermann's mind.
Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon destroyed at the edge of the Bay. Rain fell in Hermann's eyes as he watched Hong Kong's skyline burning. Finding Newton in an alley, covered in debris. The Kaiju newborn between them and Newton gripping his hand tightly. Drifting with a Kaiju. Marshall Pentecost and Chuck Hansen detonating the nuclear bomb. Danger disappearing inside the Alterverse. The reactor exploding. He thought he'd felt it as he watched the Throat collapse from a monitor in LOCCENT.
The Breach was closed.
The war was over.
And the yellow glow… it was coming from the tank on the corner of the lab, where the Kaiju brain still swam.
The Kaiju. They drifted with a Kaiju.
And now they were all gone.
Hermann felt like being sick. Any desire to sleep abandoned him, and the dull pain he'd felt up until that moment turned into a throbbing headache. Suddenly the quietness of the lab felt suffocating.
"Newton," he rasped. "Newton, wake up."
The biologist mumbled something incomprehensible and burrowed himself deeper in his makeshift bed.
Hermann sat up straighter, gritting his teeth. Something that was covering him dropped off his stomach and he shivered from the cold. His parka slipped to the ground, next to Newton's sleeping figure. Hermann ignored it.
"Newton! Wake up."
The other man stirred.
"Mmm… hey," Newton blinked up at him with a sheepish smile. "What's up, man?"
"Newton, what are we doing here?" He was not sure why he was starting with a question as inconsequential as that, but he couldn't seem to clear his mind fast enough. He only remembered fragments of what happened after the closure of the Breach. The party was a blur of colors, and thinking about it was giving him an even bigger headache.
As a way of answering, Newton let out a burst of laughter. Hermann winced at the sound.
"I don't see what's so funny about this," he huffed, irritated. He massaged his temples as a sharp pain exploded behind his left eye.
"Nothing," Newton slurred, in between laughter. "Just you, and your hangover."
"I am not hungover," Hermann grumbled. He fumbled for his cane, finding it leaning by the side of the couch, and swayed on his feet. He ached all over, but he stood and awkwardly passed over Newton's body, opting to ignore the laughing biologist.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Newton get off the ground and climb up on the couch Hermann had just abandoned, murmuring something about residual body heat and the floor being so cold. Hermann was only half-paying attention. He was busy mentally retracing the calculations on his board.
Inside the tank, the brain moved its tentacles listlessly. The memory of what he saw inside the Breach seemed more vivid when he looked directly at it, so he forcefully averted his eyes and limped past it. Past the point where he'd found Geiszler's convulsing body, too, trying not to look directly at that corner either. He stopped in front of his board. The yellow light reflected menacingly on the black and dusty surface, and he shivered as his eyes followed down the lines of numbers.
He visualized his predictive model, running down the equation again. There had been no mistakes, he knew. He had always known. But never in his meticulous calculation he could have predicted the reality of such horrors. The Kaiju came because of an order imposed upon by a higher entity. A logical structure of conquest, so precise that it had never failed them before. Countless worlds, all destroyed and colonized, and Earth was still standing. It hurt to think of that scale. He couldn't have known...
"Will you stop that," Newton groaned from his nest on the couch. "You and your equation did great. You predicted the unpredictable. Can we please go back to sleep now?"
Hermann looked over his shoulder.
He watched as the biologist buried himself deeper into the covers and turned to his left side, facing away from him.
In the same position Hermann tried to sleep in.
The same position Hermann had never before slept in.
"I didn't say anything about my equation," he managed, his mouth gone dry.
Another growl. The crown of Newton's hair was the only part of him visible.
"Yes, you did. I could hear you mumbling numbers from here."
"I didn't say anything."
The biologist's head emerged then. They locked eyes from across the lab, and something inside of Hermann clicked into place.
A turmoil of interrogatives, feelings, images, coated under the haze of drowsiness, pressed inside Hermann’s skull, coming seemingly out of nowhere. Just like inside the drift, Newton's thoughts sounded loud and clamoring. That visceral and consuming connection; how it exposed him and left him with nothing to hide behind. A flash of blue, the taste of blood in his mouth, and then Hermann was looking at the back of his head from the outside, as he stared up at his work.
The biologist's eyes widened, as the same realization dawned on him and it was like a mirror looking into itself, and the throbbing pain behind his eyes was unbearable.
"Holy shit!" Geiszler shouted and kicked his blanket away at the same time as Hermann stumbled backward. His shoulder hit the wooden ladder and he reached for the blackboard to keep himself from falling. He pushed himself away and looked at where he had left a handprint on the black surface, erasing part of the equation. He couldn't think of what numbers used to go there, in the gap, and that panicked him even more. It was all swarming together in chaos.
Hermann moved blindly. He had to send a message to the Marshal. To Hansen. To someone . They had to run some tests, talk to a doctor - or maybe to a neurologist - and get this sorted out immediately .
His foot tangled with the discarded wire, and in the jerk motion of freeing himself his hip flared in pain.
"Hermann," Newton was next to him in a second, his voice bombing inside Hermann's skull. "Calm down." He took hold of Hermann's elbow - the contact shocking and grounding him at the same time, like Newton's arms thrown over his shoulders during the party, when their thoughts had merged in waves. He could recall it more clearly now. The exhilaration, the warmth, the utter, aching grief as he kept drinking and getting inebriated on two different rhythms.
He pushed Newton away without thinking, but the biologist persisted, gripping his shoulders and spinning him around so they were face to face.
"It's okay - calm down, it's me."
"Inside my head!" Hermann yelled. He was panting; Newton was panting too but a laugh broke out of him.
"I know! Come here."
They stumbled together in the direction of Hermann's desk, and Newton directed his body until he was sitting down on a chair. His legs felt like they were made of jelly, but the room spun less when he didn't have them underneath him.
He buried his face in his hands and rested them on his knees and just concentrated on breathing, hoping he would not vomit on his already destroyed shoes.
He heard another chair being dragged, and the biologist sat down opposite to him, forcing himself in Hermann's field of vision. The bloody cut on his forehead was distressing up close. He tried to focus on the broken lens of Newton's glasses, behind which his blood-shot eyes were staring intensely at him, before deciding to ignore both those details completely, for the sake of his sanity.
"We need to go to the Med Bay." Hermann said. "We have to get this, this -" he gestured frantically at the air between the two of them, "- thing , checked." Normally there was always essential personnel in Medical, as well as in most Bays where emergencies could occur at any hour of the day, but who was he kidding? The apocalypse had been canceled, no one would be stationed and doing their jobs when it was time to celebrate being alive.
"Absolutely we do," Newton said with annoying delight. He looked even more war-torn and disheveled than Hermann felt, so he couldn't figure out why he was smiling so much. "The faster we do the testing, the fresher the data will be. And if there is no one in Med Bay, I know how to operate a MRI. We can totally do the scans on our own."
Hermann glared at him.
"I would rather have a professional behind it, thank you very much."
"I am a professional," Newton replied, offended.
"And considering your adventure in Pon rings engineering, I don't think you should be allowed to operate anything to do with the brain ever again."
"Dude, I have six PhDs."
"None in neuroscience, if I recall."
The biologist huffed. "You don't need a degree in that to operate a brain scan."
"I still would rather not do any further damage."
"Come on, we are probably fine. Ever heard of ghost drifting before? This is probably it, no reason to be so overdramatic. Besides, what we did was punk as fuck." At the dangerous look Hermann gave him Newton raised his hands in defense. "Okay, okay. Let's go to Med Bay and see what they can do."
Hermann breathed out, relieved. He was still unsure if staring at his eyes or the broken lens was better. He wanted to avert his gaze entirely, but he forced himself to look.
"Good." His nausea was lessening, but it was still turning his stomach inside out; he's painfully aware of how empty it felt. He wondered if the biologist felt it too, before banishing the thought from his mind.
"Wait, we should probably eat something before we go," Newton said not a moment later, causing Hermann to have a private panic attack. "Nothing cures a hangover like breakfast food."
"I told you, I'm not hungover." Hermann muttered, rubbing his temples.
"Yes, you are," Newton argued. "It's a little funny. Have you ever had vodka before? I swear it's like you're not even German."
Hermann gave him a tired look in between his fingers. "Ah yes, vodka - Germany's national drink."
"It can be if you're not a Bavarian posh," he shot back, then clapped his hands together. "Now, for breakfast. We should go to the mass hall. I bet it hasn't been completely ravished yet -"
Hermann grimaced. He didn’t want to go.
"- Or you could wait right here," Newton continued. "And I'm gonna run to the kitchens and bring something edible back, what do ya say?"
"That's not –"
"Don't even worry. I'll be back in like ten minutes, don’t move!"
Before he could react, Newton was pushing his chair aside and running past him. One quick pat on Hermann’s back (the contact startling him), and then he was gone, and Hermann was immersed in the silence of the lab again.
Inevitably, he stared at the yellow tank with the brain inside. His thoughts going to it like a tongue on a sore tooth.
He had to admit he had not felt at ease around the bloody thing even since it came to the lab, more so since Newton confessed his dreadful plans to initiate a drift with it. Now, it was almost hypnotizing, looking at it. It floated its tentacle-like extremities slowly, with lassitude, and part of Hermann hoped it was a sign of decay. It would not be too soon before the monstrous thing will be another piece of flesh on Newton’s operating table.
He forcefully averted his eyes and headed for the switch set. At least the overhead lights helped him ignore the glow.
Unfortunately, he could now see how filthy the lab was. Even his side was resenting from the mess Newton had made when reprogramming the Pons.
Hermann wrinkled his nose and set to tidy his desk.
The methodical activity eased the stiffness in his limbs ever so slowly. When he's satisfied with his work, he decided to clean Newton's workspace as well. Which would take significantly longer.
Ignoring the cursed spot on the floor, he started with the desk, where old reports Newton hadn't bothered compiling were laying around everywhere. He set the few labeled 'urgent' aside to inspect later, and contemplated chirurgical tools and blue strained gloves, before ultimately deciding not to touch them.
He spotted a record player too, and after a second of hesitation, he rewinded the last track and hit play.
The biologist's chatter started mid-sentence and Hermann listened absently, storing manuals in a bookshelf by the desk. He found faded blueprints and his eyes scanned the notes. Geiszler’s handwriting was a mess of scribbles, with entire parts canceled and written on the margins. It was hard to decipher, but for Hermann, who had spent years working with the man and still remembered the first response letter that had arrived at his house, a lifetime ago, it was easy to navigate. He frowned at a paragraph when he read:
Kaiju-man drift theory - nothing about the chemical and physical structure of a Kaiju is compatible with a human brain.
Neural impulses will react to a neurological mind that can only stabilize a drift through a compatible structure.
Lower tolerance at minimum!
Hermann tried to pierce the meaning to something the biologist might have said, but recalled nothing. A vague image of himself setting aside spare mechanical parts that had no use came to his mind, but he couldn’t quite place it.
He shook his head, the ache worsening. He was in the middle of decrypting another passage when he realized what Newton in the recorder was talking about. His blood froze in his veins.
"- is probably too damaged to even attempt to drift with. Unscientific aside: Hermann, if you’re listening to this, well, I’m either alive and I’ve proven what I’ve just done works, in which case, ha ha! I won —"
"Hermann!"
Hermann turned to see Newton in the flesh walk in, holding several food containers in his arms.
"I couldn't get any -" he stopped in his tracks as he heard the recorder playing back his first experiment with the Kaiju brain. His wide eyes going from Hermann to the device resting on the desk.
"— or I’m dead, and I’d like you to know this is all your fault. It really is. You drove me to this. In which case, ha ha! I also won… Sort of… Here I go in 3, 2, 1..."
The voice in the speaker turned into static and Hermann shut it off, nerveless, as the appalling gravity of the situation settled on him.
"Hermann," Newton's voice was softer than the one recorded. "Listen, I'm - I'm sorry. It was a real dick move to leave you a passive-aggressive goodbye note to tell you it was your fault. Which it wasn't! I hope you know that. It wasn't your fault..."
Hermann shot him a desperate look, his hand still clutching the recorder, and Newton’s voice died down.
A few hours ago, Hermann had yelled at him even as he had hauled his convulsing body into a chair and forced him to stay awake. He had berated and screamed after the biologist as he had left the Shatterdome to go do the same thing that almost killed him once, only with a bigger chance of not walking out of it alive. He had argued even as he had watched Newton work on the carcass of the small Kaiju, and had bargained with himself on whether he should follow Newton or watch him die.
He couldn't bring himself to yell, or to argue, now.
But he didn't want Newton's apology, either.
Newton could have died in the first drift, he could have died in the second drift if he had gone alone, and this recorded message would have been the last words Hermann had heard from him.
Or they could have died together, he thought. And all of humanity would have gone down right after them.
Hermann didn't believe in miracles, or in luck. It was just people assigning value to inanimate events, believing fate controlled them. Newton was one of those people, but Hermann couldn’t afford to be as naïve. They couldn’t both run head first into danger. They couldn’t both throw useless blame without ever taking accountability.
You didn't tell me you were gonna strap yourself to a Kaiju brain, he wanted to say. Hurt and anger coating his thoughts.
He knew Newton well enough to imagine what he’d answer, and it was unnerving how close to nature the voice in his head felt.
Oh, but I did tell you. You just thought I was kidding and left me unsupervised.
"Are you okay?" Newton asked, taking a step forward just as Hermann came to himself rigidly.
"I'm perfectly fine." His voice didn't shake, thankfully, but the gloomy look on Newton’s face almost made him feel bad for harshly shutting down his concerns.
Almost.
He didn’t want empty apologies; what he wanted was certainty that whatever Newton did to make the drift work with a Kaiju would not permanently affect them.
They were both alive, and it was as close to a miracle as Hermann was willing to define it, but he would not be caught at fault, not with this – this, afflicting connection they shared, and that they might be sharing with something more sinister than just each other.
"Forget about the food," he said, the severity in his voice a familiar camouflage. "I'm ready to go."